Conventional fabrics are often easily frayed or damaged when they abrade against the rough surfaces of hard objects such as coarse cement, rocks, and asphalt. Yarns and fibers, especially on the surface of fabrics tend to abrade, lose mass, or even melt due to the heat of friction when exposed to relatively high abrasion conditions.
High-performance fabrics have been developed for some abrasion applications. One approach is to tightly weave or knit high denier yarn (e.g. nylon, polyester, etc.) into a fabric. Thermoplastic coatings can be applied to such fabrics to enhance abrasion resistance. Various high strength fibers (e.g. Kevlar®, PBO, steel, glass, Dyneema®) are sometimes used in high performance fabrics. However, these high strength fibers tend to be brittle, and therefore, are not associated with exceptional abrasion performance in many applications.
Further, many current high performance or abrasion resistant fabrics are bulky, stiff and expensive. Moreover, many abrading objects have sharp or pointed features (e.g. tree branches or rocks) that can snag the fabric and cause failure from tearing or puncturing.
HDM manufactures and sells sheets of SuperFabric® brand material that provide slash and abrasion resistance through the use of hard plates screen printed onto and affixed to the surface of a fabric in a closely spaced geometric pattern. This material is made into gloves by die cutting parts from the sheets and sewing or bonding the parts onto a glove. This results in a glove with excellent cut and abrasion resistance. However, this glove manufacturing method can be inefficient.
Gloves are often made from a knitting process. Rubber dots are sometimes printed onto knitted gloves to improve their grip properties. However, the material used in these dots is purposely chosen to be a relatively soft material since this gives the best grip enhancement for many applications. These soft rubber dots, however, provide little if any puncture or cut resistance. Moreover, when soft rubber dots are used, the abrasion resistance is not improved enough for practical applications where hard abrading objects can cut into and damage the material of the rubber dot.